Trading Related Quotes

your art is not about how many people like your work your art is about if your heart likes your work if your soul likes your work it's about how honest you are with yourself and you must never trade honesty for relatability

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

You cannot trade the courage needed to live every moment for immunity from life's sorrows. We may say we know this but ours is the culture of the deal-making mind. From infancy, we have breathed in the belief that there is always a deal to be made, a bargain to be struck. Eventually, we believe, if we do the right thing, if we are good enough, clever enough, sincere enough, work hard enough, we will be rewarded. There are different verses to this song - if you are sorry for your sins and try hard not to sin again, you will go to heaven; if you do your daily practise, clean up your diet, heal your inner child, ferret out all your emotional issue's, focus your intent, come into alignment with the world around you, hone your affirmations, find and listen to the voice of your higher self, you will be rewarded with vibrant health, abundant prosperity, loving relations and inner peace - in other words, heaven! We know that what we do and how we think affects the quality of our lives. Many things are clearly up to us. And many others are not. I can see no evidence that the universe works on a simple meritocratic system of cause and effect. Bad things happen to good people - all the time. Monetary success does come to some who do not do what they love, as well as to some who are unwilling or unable to see the harm they do to the planet or others. Illness and misfortune come to some who follow their soul's desire. Many great artist's have been poor. Great teachers have lived in obscurity. My invitation, my challenge to you here, is to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world and your life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of full participation.

Connor, Ryke, and Lo—they protect me all the time. They care about me when they don’t have to. These are three brothers that I’d never trade in, never swap out, and even though we’re not blood related, I know they’re mine.

One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents

I am what I am, and there's much about me that won't be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I'm sorry for that. I'd trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I'm afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It's too late for me to change.

Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average personal values, all of which must be quantitively different or trade would be impossible.

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

A lot of what we do in relationships involve compromises. A lot of our relationships are exchanges in currencies like affection, acceptance, money, sexual and other sorts of pleasure, shelter, convenience, belonging etc. The self in relation with the communal is always trading something. The important question is what aspect of the self should not be traded.

In the second place, the term “Caucasian” as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

His [the pedestrian's] elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts his at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.

Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.

There has been a cultural shift in the way we communicate, and that, in turn, has had an effect on our relating. We have traded substance and depth for speed and convenience.

I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.” Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?” “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.

Small societies are particularly vulnerable to disruption of key lifelines, such as trading relations, or to large perturbations like wars or natural disasters. Larger societies, with more diverse and extensive resources, can rush aid to disaster victims. But the complexity that brings resilience may also impede adaptation and change, producing social inertia that maintains collectively destructive behavior. Consequently, large societies have difficulty adapting to slow change and remain vulnerable to problems that eat away their foundation, such as soil erosion. In contrast, small systems are adaptable to shifting baselines but are acutely vulnerable to large perturbations. But unlike the first farmer-hunter-gatherers who could move around when their soil was used up, a global civilization cannot.

Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.

Your art is not about how many people like your art your art is about if your heart likes your work if your soul likes your work it's about how honest you are with yourself and you must never trade honesty for relatability.

By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low. But my care with words raised another issue on the campaign trail: I was just plain wordy, and that was a problem. When asked a question, I tended to offer circuitous and ponderous answers, my mind instinctively breaking up every issue into a pile of components and subcomponents. If every argument had two sides, I usually came up with four. If there was an exception to some statement I just made, I wouldn’t just point it out; I’d provide footnotes. “You’re burying the lede!” Axe would practically shout after listening to me drone on and on and on. For a day or two I’d obediently focus on brevity, only to suddenly find myself unable to resist a ten-minute explanation of the nuances of trade policy or the pace of Arctic melting. “What d’ya think?” I’d say, pleased with my thoroughness as I walked offstage. “You got an A on the quiz,” Axe would reply. “No votes, though.

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.

One of my favorite patterns is the tendency for the markets to move from relative lows to relative highs and vice versa every two to four days. This pattern is a function of human behavior. It takes several days of a market rallying before it looks really good. That’s when everyone wants to buy it, and that’s the time when the professionals, like myself, are selling. Conversely, when the market has been down for a few days, and everyone is bearish, that’s the time I like to be buying.

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.

Sisters are like best friends whom you can never get rid of. They are there to laugh with you, cry with you, and sometimes laugh at you. They are God-given teammates, and we wouldn't trade them for the world. Can we get an "amen" from all the sisters out there? We're talking to you, girl. Yep, sisters in Christ all the way. We may not be related by birth, but we are related by the blood of Christ. We, as Christian women, are going to spend eternity together with our Father in heaven. We can honestly say we will be sisters forever.

(one study found that 88 percent of the loss of US manufacturing jobs between 2006 and 2013 was due to automation and related factors),69 it is easy to blame trade with other countries for hollowing out industrial towns and throwing workers onto the unemployment line.

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die or hunger. The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

China's internal divisions have made it far harder to strike the kind of deals that made it possible for the two countries to open up diplomatic relations decades ago or get China entry into the World Trade Organization. If Nixon were going to open China today, the Interior Ministry would probably get into an argument with the Chinese president's office about whether to let Air Force One land, and then demand the plane's antimissile technology as the price for refueling

He warned me that trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it.

It is impossible to say whether an asset class valuation is cheap or expensive in isolation. The valuation of an asset is relative to the valuations of all other assets.

Identical information can lead to opposite conclusions based on relative perceptions of its receivers.

Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?

This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.

well-functioning market requires all three types of investors for socially beneficial projects to have access to cheap capital. Value investors allocate capital to its most productive use. Speculators, because they trade frequently, provide the liquidity and trading volume that allows value investors and relative value traders to execute their trades cheaply. They also ensure that information is disseminated quickly.

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.

At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2001, as died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow.

The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers.

The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class- leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.

Thus as foreign mining and logging companies open up new areas for new forms of colonial exploitation they set up prostitution industries to service the workers. These industries have a profound effect on local cultures and relations between men and women.

President Trump displays less finesse than a bull in a china shop. Just as Prime Minister May managed - after many months of bitter wrangling - to reach a degree of consensus on what Britain's future relationship with the EU should look like, in comes the marauding beast upending all the finely balanced Wedgwood. Britain may well need some form of future trade deal with the US but it certainly isn't one that should be struck with the co-author of a lame business book more appropriately named 'Art of the Steal'.

Many of the issues that motivated Obama—growing the American economy, combating climate change, forging new rules to govern trade and commerce among nations—depended upon cooperation in Asia. While the Middle East represented the past—its religious wars, American-backed autocrats, Iranian revolutionaries, terrorist threats—Asia seemed to represent the future. It helped that the people and governments in Asia wanted to deepen relations with “the United States, in part because of their concerns about the largest emerging power in their neighborhood: China

as we clashed together and commenced our collaboration on another chapter of the famous, familiar and amusing saga of human relations—choosing heat instead of grace, possession over possibility—trading the kingdom of heaven one more time for two arms full of beautiful, confusing earth.

I’m emotional because I got the three brothers I always wished I had. Connor, Ryke, and Lo—they protect me all the time. They care about me when they don’t have to. These are three brothers that I’d never trade in, never swap out, and even though we’re not blood related, I know they’re mine.

The total of all drug-related deaths due to AIDS, drug overdose, or the violence associated with the illegal drug trade, was estimated at 21,000 annually—less than the number of deaths directly caused by drunk drivers, and a small fraction of the number of alcohol-related deaths that occur every year.

Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification----denying real class differences whenever possible. The relative few who escape their lower class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance of succeeding through cleverness and hard work, scrimping and saving. Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today's business and professional worlds.

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It’s crucial to understand that ordinarily the FBI applies for a wiretap separately from the National Security Agency. The NSA had tapped my phones for years, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center attack. But those wire taps would not automatically get shared with the FBI, unless the Intelligence Community referred my activities for a criminal investigation. The FBI took no such action. Instead—by coincidence I’m sure, the FBI started its phone taps exactly when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee planned a series of hearings on Iraq in late July, 2002.212 That timing suggests the FBI wanted to monitor what Congress would learn about the realities of Pre-War Intelligence, which contradicted everything the White House was preaching on FOX News and CNN. In which case, the Justice Department discovered that I told Congress a lot—and Congress rewarded the White House by pretending that I had not said a word. But phone taps don’t lie. Numerous phone conversations with Congressional offices show that I identified myself as one of the few Assets covering Iraq.213 Some of my calls described the peace framework, assuring Congressional staffers that diplomacy could achieve the full scope of results sought by U.S policymakers.

Ricardo's theory is absolutely right-within its narrow confines. His theory correctly says that, accepting their current levels of technology as given, it is better for countries to specialize in things that they are relatively better at. One cannot argue with that. His theory fails when a country wants to acquire more advanced technologies so that it can do more difficult things that few others can do- that is, when it wants to develop its economy. It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries. Ricardo's theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.

Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement. For relatively smallscale trade, grain dealers could transact with several suppliers as long as they knew the measure each was using. They might actually profit from their superior grasp of the profusion of units, much as smugglers take advantage of small differences in taxes and tariffs. Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures.

Donald Trump consciously stokes racist sentiment, and has given a rocket boost to the ‘alt-right’ fringe of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But to write off all those who voted for him as bigoted will only make his job easier. It is also inaccurate. Millions who backed Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Did they suddenly become deplorable? A better explanation is that many kinds of Americans have long felt alienated from an establishment that has routinely sidelined their economic complaints. In 2008 America went for the outsider, an African-American with barely any experience in federal politics. Obama offered hope. In 2016 it went for another outsider with no background in any kind of politics. Trump channelled rage. To be clear: Trump poses a mortal threat to all America’s most precious qualities. But by giving a higher priority to the politics of ethnic identity than people’s common interests, the American left helped to create what it feared. The clash of economic interests is about relative trade-offs. Ethnic politics is a game of absolutes. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the overwhelming majority of non-college whites. By 2016, most of them had defected. Having branded their defection as racially motivated, liberals are signalling that they do not want them back.

No one is alone in this world. No act is without consequences for others. It is a tenet of chaos theory that, in dynamical systems, the outcome of any process is sensitive to its starting point-or, in the famous cliche, the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas. I do not assert markets are chaotic, though my fractal geometry is one of the primary mathematical tools of "chaology." But clearly, the global economy is an unfathomably complicated machine. To all the complexity of the physical world of weather, crops, ores, and factories, you add the psychological complexity of men acting on their fleeting expectations of what may or may not happen-sheer phantasms. Companies and stock prices, trade flows and currency rates, crop yields and commodity futures-all are inter-related to one degree or another, in ways we have barely begun to understand. In such a world, it is common sense that events in the distant past continue to echo in the present.

In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words. ... The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.

If socialist regimes work together, trade together, fight together, collaborate, and have fundamentally equivalent ideologies and tactics, they are genealogically related (a sort of Communist-Nazi brotherhood), which could be regarded as a Fascist-Marxist mindset. Of course, these socialist ideologues also fight each like rival siblings

Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth

It is because the Pentagon is a relatively flat and unassuming building, whereas the World Trade Center was a tall phallic totem whose collapse created an immense audiovisual effect. Nobody who saw the images of its collapse could ever forget them. Because we intuitively understand that terrorism is theater, we judge it by its emotional rather than material impact.

Nestorian Christians, expelled for their heresies from the Byzantine Empire but tolerated in the Muslim world as "people of the book," began to arrive from the West via the overland route. It is easy to see how a splinter Christian movement, repelled by the savage intolerance of the Catholic Church and attracted by the relative tolerance of Islam, spread ever eastward.

The UK needs a post Brexit US trade deal like a hole in the head. Given America's out-of-control opioid crisis, fuelled by prescription drug addiction, along with an obesity epidemic like the world has never seen, why on earth would the UK want to open its doors to US healthcare companies ? So that they can wreak untold havoc and destroy our National Health Service ? No thanks !

There are many well-known arguments for why the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was different. It was higher tech. Death came faster. It was industrial in its scale. All true. But it’s also true that every holocaust is different. Every genocide has its own particular characteristics, and every hated group is hated in its own special way. By sheer numbers of dead, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas surpasses all others. In terms of modern technologies, the transatlantic trade in kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the plantations the trade served in the antebellum South and the Caribbean, were highly modern for their times. So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management. And as Rinaldo Walcott, a scholar of race and gender, writes in his manifesto On Property, “The ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations.” Among those social relations are modern policing, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration. On what else does the claim to exceptionalism rest?

In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities. If one hundred different commodities are traded in the market, then buyers and sellers will have to know 4,950 different exchange rates. And if 1,000 different commodities are traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 different exchange rates!5 How do you figure it out?

Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested within six paces of the anarchist nicknamed the Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair.

Bears, it turns out, are a lot like humans. They form alliances with strangers, they make calculations about relative costs and benefits, they lay down rules and punish those who break them. They trade based on a clear system of reciprocity. They communicate using equal parts emotion, intention, and dependence on context-a combination that is essential for communication between strangers and in fact forms the basis for language.

...Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force -- and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments -- the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place.

Our ability to create change in others is often and importantly grounded in shared personal relationships, which create a pre-suasive context for assent. It’s a poor trade-off, then, for social influence when we allow present-day forces of separation—distancing societal changes, insulating modern technologies—to take a shared sense of human connection out of our exchanges. The relation gets removed, leaving just the ships, passing at sea.87 UNITY

Women exercise agency in order to survive the power relations and oppressive circumstances in which they find themselves. The theoretical task, Miriam argues, is for radical feminist theory to 'theorize freedom in terms of women’s collective political agency (power to): this task requires an understanding that freedom is not negotiating within a situation taken as inevitable, but rather, a capacity to radically transform and/or determine the situation itself'.

At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths — and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.

Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.

Value" has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human - "market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible ... This very personal relationship, "value," has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him ... and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts "the best things in life are free." Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiements failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted ... and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream—the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people.

Battle rappers having an insult contest. Men and boys compete in ritualized insult wars all around the world. Earlier we saw how the instinctive choreography of a standard human fight has been elaborated into the world’s various formal dueling systems. The same goes for the monkey dance of the banter fight, which always involves the same basic moves and rules. Two men take turns hurling boasts and insults. The contests draw spectators, who laugh and hoot as the men derogate each other’s masculinity, while also leveling hilariously vile attacks on relatives (especially mothers). All around the world, the verbal duel is a pure monkey dance for the mind, in which men compete in verbal artistry, wit, and the ability to take a rhetorical punch. Like other forms of the monkey dance, scholars have wondered why boys and men are drawn to verbal duels, and girls and women generally aren’t. This strikes me as a very male sort of question to ask. It’s sort of like a dung beetle wondering why humans don’t find feces delicious. Women avoid verbal duels not because they’ve been told it’s unladylike, but because trading the vilest attacks conceivable while vying in braggadocio just isn’t most women’s idea of a good time. Why don’t people eat feces? Because coprophagy isn’t in our nature. Why don’t women like to duel verbally? Because it’s not in theirs.

Right-wing populist movements appeal to historically dominant population groups that have been left behind economically relative to their expectations: the poorly educated, those who live in rural areas, and workers who have lost jobs because of international trade.18 Arguments made by the leaders of right-wing populist movements for trade barriers and immigration restrictions fall on willing ears. But rather than explicitly appeal to class identity or distributive justice, the leaders of right-wing populist movements appeal to the ethno-nationalist creed of “blood and soil.” These groups look nostalgically back to a past when people like them enjoyed greater economic security and higher status.

Using an example of how this would work in a more relatable scenario. If you were to imagine a hacker accessing the computer system of your bank and transferring all your funds from your own account into his and deleting all evidence of the transaction, existing technology would not be able to pick this up and you would likely be out of pocket. In the case of a blockchain currency like Bitcoin, having one server hacked with a false transaction being inserted into the database would not be consistent with the same record across the other copies of the database. The blockchain would identify the transaction as being illegitimate and would ultimately reject it meaning the money in your account would be kept safe.

In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do well in that calling and those related to it. It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place. "Occupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses.

OBAMA’S FRUSTRATION WITH HIS critics boiled over during a lengthy trip to Asia in the spring of 2014. In the region, the trip was seen as another carefully designed U.S. effort to counter China. We’d go to Japan, to bring them into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—weaving together twelve Asia Pacific economies into one framework of trade rules, environmental protections, and labor rights. We’d go to South Korea and discuss ways to increase pressure on North Korea. We’d go to Malaysia, something of a swing state in Southeast Asia, which we were bringing closer through TPP. And we’d end in the Philippines, a U.S. ally that was mired in territorial disputes with China over maritime boundaries in the South China Sea.

And then I recalled those mysterious stories about the waxworkers of the middle ages and the public reprobation attached to their trade. Did they not live in cellars, in the eternal twilight propitious for enchantments and apparitions? Their visionary art (who, more than they, evoked a truer image of life?) was closely related to that of magicians: bewitchments were carried out with wax figures, witch trials are full of them, and one particular legend haunted me above all, that of the modeler from Anspach, who slowly squeezed the soul and the life out of his model in order to animate his painted waxwork and then, having finished his work of art, awaited nightfall to go and bury the corpse in the ditch at the city walls.

They were is fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other’s methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establish a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machines for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same.

I think it's part of moral progress to be able to face things that once looked as if they weren't problems. I have that kind of feeling about our relation to animals... Abortion's a similar case-there are complicated moral issues. Feminist issues were a similar case. Slavery was a similar case. I mean, some of these things seem easy now, because we've solved them and there's a kind of shared consensus-but I think it's a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animal rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like, to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals? I mean, yes, you want to do animal experimentation for the prevention of diseases. But what's the balance, where's the trade-off?

If there are so many successful public enterprises, why do we rarely hear about them? It is partly because of the nature of reporting, whether journalistic or academic. Newspapers tend to report bad things – wars, natural disasters, epidemics, famines, crime, bankruptcy, etc. While it is natural and necessary for newspapers to focus on these events, the journalistic habit tends to present the public with the bleakest possible view of the world. In the case of SOEs, journalists and academics usually investigate them only when things go wrong – inefficiency, corruption or negligence.Well-performing SOEs attract relatively little attention in the same way that a peaceful and productive day in the life of a ‘model citizen’ is unlikely to make front-page news. There

We, the bourgeoisie – the Third Estate, as we have been called – we recognize only that nobility which consists of merit; we refuse to admit any longer the rights of the indolent aristocracy, we repudiate the class distinctions of the present day, we desire that all men should be free and equal, that no person shall be subject to another, but all subject to the law. There shall be no more privilege and arbitrary rule. All shall be sovereign children of the state; and as no middlemen exist any longer between the people and almighty God, so shall the citizen stand in direct relation to the State. We will have freedom of the press, of trade and industry, so that all men, without distinction, shall be able to strive together and receive their reward according to their merit.

It is true that there are important differences between that money which plays the chief part in domestic trade, is the instrument of most exchanges, predominates in the dealings between consumers and sellers of consumption goods, and in loan transactions, and is recognized by the law as legal tender, and that money which is employed in relatively few transactions, is hardly ever used by consumers in their purchases, does not function as an instrument of loan operations, and is not legal tender. In popular opinion, the former money only is domestic money, the latter foreign money. Although we cannot accept this if we do not want to close the way to an understanding of the problem that occupies us, we must nevertheless emphasize that it has great significance in other connexions.

He introduces me to his political friends from across the spectrum. Conservatives who oo and ah and nod, telling me I'm just what this country is about. And so articulate! Frowning liberals who put it simply: my immoral career is counterproductive to my own community. Can I see that? My primary issue is poverty, not race. Their earnest faces tilt to assess my comprehension, my understanding of my role in this society. They conjure metaphors of boats and tides and rising waves of fairness. Not reparations -no, even socialism doesn't stretch that far. Though some do propose a rather capitalistic trickle-down from Britain to her lagging Commonwealth friends. Through economic generosity: trade and strong relations! Global leadership. The centrists nod. The son nods, too. Now that, they can all agree to.

Here now,” said the big man, “you'll have to admit that the laboring man is certainly highly paid—five and six hour days—it's ridiculous. You can't buy an honest day's work from a man in the trades-unions.” “You've brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people never make concessions until they're wrung out of you.” “What people?” “Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.” “Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he'd be any more willing to give it up?” “No, but what's that got to do with it?” The older man considered. “No, I'll admit it hasn't. It rather sounds as if it had though.” “In fact,” continued Amory, “he'd be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish—certainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.

Various realities out here unknown in the East, as I have learned.” He cleared his throat. “Here is the legal situation. It is illegal for Texas state troops or ranger companies to cross the Red River into Indian Territory and onto this reservation. It is against our orders to pursue raiding Indians over the line as well, even in hot pursuit. Once they come onto the reservation they are not to be confronted. In addition the reconstruction government in Texas is forbidding any state militia or ranger companies at all. The new requirements are that we cannot use force in any way. I am very happy with that. Believe me. But they do raid down into Texas, and they take captives. They say that was their hunting and raiding country long before we came. Then the parents and relatives come here to the agency and want the agency to get their children back, or whoever, but unless we offer money and trade goods we’re bolloxed.

Maybe your priority actually is money. Or maybe it’s family. Maybe it’s influence or change. Maybe it’s building an organization that lasts, or serves a purpose. All of these are perfectly fine motivations. But you do need to know. You need to know what you don’t want and what your choices preclude. Because strategies are often mutually exclusive. One cannot be an opera singer and a teen pop idol at the same time. Life requires those trade-offs, but ego can’t allow it. So why do you do what you do? That’s the question you need to answer. Stare at it until you can. Only then will you understand what matters and what doesn’t. Only then can you say no, can you opt out of stupid races that don’t matter, or even exist. Only then is it easy to ignore “successful” people, because most of the time they aren’t—at least relative to you, and often even to themselves. Only then can you develop that quiet confidence Seneca talked about.

In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey Butane in my veins and I'm out to cut the junkie With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose Kill the headlights and put it in neutral Stock car flamin' with a loser in the cruise control Baby's in Reno with the Vitamin D Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love seat Someone came in sayin' I'm insane to complain About a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt Don't believe everything that you breathe You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve So shave your face with some mace in the dark Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park Yo, cut it Soy un perdedor I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Double barrel buckshot) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? Forces of evil on a bozo nightmare Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber 'Cause one's got a weasel and the other's got a flag One's on the pole, shove the other in a bag With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose-job The daytime crap of the folksinger slob He hung himself with a guitar string A slab of turkey neck and it's hangin' from a pigeon wing You can't write if you can't relate Trade the cash for the beef, for the body, for the hate And my time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite That's chokin' on the splinters Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Get crazy with the cheese whiz) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Drive-by body pierce) Yo, bring it on down I'm a driver, I'm a winner Things are gonna change, I can feel it Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (I can't believe you) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? Soy un perdedor I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me? (Sprechen sie Deutsche, baby) Soy un perdedor I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? (Know what I'm sayin'?)

For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.

They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speakeasy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.

The voices I give, however decorated with observations and interpretations of the other, are, nevertheless and certainly, very much my own. But they do not speak for the other--and therefore speak falsely. They speak rather to the other: the other in me, the other in you, the other in my other friend--assuming he would not finally and for the first time turn at this particular outrage to the real we call "his story" and laugh with undisguised derision at my preposterous fancy with no relation at all to his life, his madness, his city--instead of giving out with his usual applause. They speak against the other. They speak always in dialogue with, in contrast to, in protest of the real. They are always calling out to the other across the bridge on whose wild span madness and desire endlessly trade places, creating a wilderness at their center as palpably dangerous as that observed at any ill-mapped border. The monologue of art must be reinterpreted as the many-voiced argument of the artist with life, with life's images--indeed, as the wrangle between the articulate and everything else, with desire never fully possessed by any party, but endlessly at play between.

As Sharar pointed out, a large part of Europe's power consisted of its capacity to kill, which was enhanced by continuous and vicious wars among the region's small nations in the seventeenth century, a time when Asian countries knew relative peace. 'The only trouble with us,' Fukuzawa Yukichi, author, educator and prolific commentator on Japan's modernization, lamented in the 1870s, 'is that we have had too long a period of peace and no intercourse with outside. In the meantime, other countries, stimulated by occasional wars, have invented many new things such as steam trains, steam ships, big guns and small hand guns etc.' Required to fight at sea as well as on land, and to protect their slave plantations in the Caribbean, the British, for instance, developed the world's most sophisticated naval technologies. Mirza Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim traveller to Europe in 1800, was among the first Asians to articulate the degree to which the Royal Navy was the key to British prosperity. For much of the nineteenth century, British ships and commercial companies would retain their early edge in international trade over their European rivals, as well as over Asian producers and traders.

The question is not whether the world’s problems will become everyone’s problems, but on what terms they will. Militarized borders, resource wars, and inequality that grows as its ecological and economic faces interact: These are the features of a re-barbarized world, in which people and peoples do not even try to live in reciprocity or aim at any shared horizon beyond the ecological scarcity that presses down inequitably on everyone. The ways the world’s respectable powers have been pretending to build a global commonwealth, by growth and trade, have brought us here. Although the polite official response to global inequality is still to regret it and seek ways to mitigate it, the rising political tide is a cruder and more candid call to maintain your own relatively and (temporarily) secure place in it against whoever would take it away. There is neither time enough nor world enough—we would need several worlds with comparable resources—to grow and trade our way to a global capitalist version of commonwealth. But the notorious fact that in the long run we are all dead, and so is the world, has become a perverse source of comfort to those who think they can ride out disaster long enough for their own purposes, until their own lights go out.

Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, “Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check. “I went to the ship’s medical bay and plugged myself into the encephalographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under Government medical officers before my nomination for presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn’t have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I’d given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?” Ford nodded. “And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.” Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white. “Somebody did that to you?” whispered Ford. “Yeah.” “But have you any idea who? Or why?” “Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.” “You know? How do you know?” “Because they left their initials burned into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.” Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl. “Initials? Burned into your brain?” “Yeah.” “Well, what were they, for God’s sake?” Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away. “Z.B.,” he said quietly. At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas started to pour into the chamber. “I’ll tell you about it later,” choked Zaphod as all three passed out.

Statisticians say that stocks with healthy dividends slightly outperform the market averages, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. On average, high-yielding stocks have lower price/earnings ratios and skew toward relatively stable industries. Stripping out these factors, generous dividends alone don’t seem to help performance. So, if you need or like income, I’d say go for it. Invest in a company that pays high dividends. Just be sure that you are favoring stocks with low P/Es in stable industries. For good measure, look for earnings in excess of dividends, ample free cash flow, and stable proportions of debt and equity. Also look for companies in which the number of shares outstanding isn’t rising rapidly. To put a finer point on income stocks to skip, reverse those criteria. I wouldn’t buy a stock for its dividend if the payout wasn’t well covered by earnings and free cash flow. Real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, and royalty trusts often trade on their yield rather than their asset value. In some of those cases, analysts disagree about the economic meaning of depreciation and depletion—in particular, whether those items are akin to earnings or not. Without looking at the specific situation, I couldn’t judge whether the per share asset base was shrinking over time or whether generally accepted accounting principles accounting was too conservative. If I see a high-yielder with swiftly rising share counts and debt levels, I assume the worst.

A region of the brain becomes mature when it settles down into a lean, functionally well-organized system. A good proxy for neural pruning in the brain is the relative density of gray versus white matter in a given region. Gray matter, the neuron-rich part of the brain that does the bulk of the computational work, decreases in density as a region matures. As gray matter density decreases, the density of white matter—the myelinated axons that transmit information, the outputs of the computational work done by gray matter—increases, resulting in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility. One way to envision this is to see an immature, gray-matter-rich region as an undeveloped, open field, where one can wander in many directions unconstrained, but not very efficiently. In order to get to that wonderful blackberry bush to harvest some fruit, I have to bushwhack my way through vegetation and ford streams. The gradual replacement of gray matter by white matter reflects the development of this field: As roads are laid and bridges are built, I can move around more easily and quickly, but now I’m going to tend to move only along these established pathways. The new paved road to the blackberry bush makes gathering blackberries much more convenient, but rushing along on the new road I will miss the delicious wild strawberries I would have otherwise stumbled upon in the brush. There is a trade-off between flexibility and efficiency, between discovery and goal achievement.

If someone publishes an essay, or tells a joke, or performs a play that forwards a problematic idea the U.S. government generally wouldn't try to stop that person from doing so. Even if they could. If the expression doesn't involve national security the government generally doesn't give a shit. But, if enough vocal consumers are personally offended, they can silence that artist just as effectively. They can petition advertisers and marginalize the artist's reception and economically remove that individual from whatever platform he or she happens to utilize simply because there are no expression based platforms that don't have an economic underpinning. It's one of those situations where the practical manifestation is the opposite of the technical intention. As Americans we tend to look down on European countries that impose legal limitations on speech. Yet as long as speakers in those countries stay within the specified boundaries discourse is allowed relatively unfettered, even when it's unpopular. In the U.S., there are absolutely no speech boundaries imposed by the government. So the citizenry creates its own limitations based on the arbitrary values of whichever activist group is most successful at inflicting its worldview upon an economically fragile public sphere. As a consequence, the United States is a safe space for those who want to criticize the government, but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomforting. Some would argue that this trade off is worth it. Time may prove otherwise.

People are free. Well, they can't fly on their own . . . but pretty much whatever they can think up, they can make happen. When they're sleepy, they can sleep. They're free to start or quit whatever they're doing whenever they want. And the only reason they don't is because things like social norms, laws, traditions and sentiment get in the way. Running naked through the streets . . . conning old people . . . killing . . . everything’s possible if you ignore morality. That's why they insist on teaching you cooperation and ethics when you're young- But the world is set up to force people to fight, cheat and steal as a default. Trying to live with that contradiction is torture. But in so many places happiness and sorrow are traded like stocks on wall street. What will it take for everyone to be happy? Who knows? But if a kid could figure it out, war would've gone extinct long time ago. I'd hate to trust the entire thing to politicians. They're just old men who have to dance to public opinion. The world is the embodiment of human nature exposed . . . There's no way for everyone to be happy. Happiness is relative anyway . . . and people want it that way. Evil is relative too. In order to protect her, a mother can turn into a demon. And it gets held up as inspirational. People go to war to protect kin and country. It's the same thing. Even if you pretend to be good fundamentally everyone has some negative aspects. It's amazing that no one knows that. Why? People have become so adept at excuses and shifting the blame . . . that they never even consider the possibility that they're culpable for their own problems.

I know you’ve had some bad luck recently, but there’s this guy, he plays for New York, they’re looking at trading him—” “Buck, I don’t want to date another hockey player.” I set down my controller so I can shovel more of the sundae into my mouth, uncaring of the suffering that will follow this frozen dairy heaven. “Not all of us are dogs, Violet. Randall’s a great guy.” “His name is Randall. How awesome can he be?” Buck mows down a group of people playing road hockey. “He goes by Randy.” “Even better. His name is another word for horny. Sounds perfect for me.” I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry. It’s not Randall’s fault his parents named him in relation to horniness. I can’t even entertain the idea of dating anyone else right now. Besides, I could never get serious with a hockey player again, or a dude named Randy. I’d make thrusting motions every time I said his name. It’d be awkward. “Wait a minute. Didn’t Alex get suspended for kicking the shit out of some guy named Randy?” I’m almost positive this is the case. “That was Randolph Cockburn. This is Randy Balls.” “Are you serious?” What’s with these guys with terrible last names? “Yeah, why?” Buck, my perverted stepbrother, doesn’t connect the outlandishly pornographic last name with the first name. “Randy Balls?” I burst out laughing. “You want to set me up with a guy named Randy Balls? Can you even imagine what would happen if we got married? My last name would be Balls. Violet Balls!” “Huh.” He makes a scrunchy face. “That wouldn’t be so good, would it? ’Specially if you hyphenated. Hall-Balls.” I continue to laugh until I start crying, which turns into hysterical, desperate sobs. I don’t want to end up as Violet Balls. I wanted to be Violet Waters—it sounds so romantic—and Alex ruined it all. My life sucks Randy’s balls.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

In the U.S. Articles of Confederation, the federal government gave itself the exclusive right to regulate “the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This power was repeated in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which further refined “trade” and “affairs” to include the purchase and sale of Indian land. The intent of these two pieces of legislation was clear. Whatever powers states were to have, those powers did not extend to Native peoples. Beginning in 1823, there would be three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee v. Georgia, Worcester v. Georgia—that would confirm the powers that the U.S. government had unilaterally taken upon itself and spell out the legal arrangement that tribes were to be allowed. 1823. Johnson v. McIntosh. The court decided that private citizens could not purchase land directly from Indians. Since all land in the boundaries of America belonged to the federal government by right of discovery, Native people could sell their land only to the U.S. government. Indians had the right of occupancy, but they did not hold legal title to their lands. 1831. Cherokee v. Georgia. The State of Georgia attempted to extend state laws to the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee argued that they were a foreign nation and therefore not subject to the laws of Georgia. The court held that Indian tribes were not sovereign, independent nations but domestic, dependent nations. 1832. Worcester v. Georgia. This case was a follow-up to Cherokee v. Georgia. Having determined that the Cherokee were a domestic, dependent nation, the court settled the matter of jurisdiction, ruling that the responsibility to regulate relations with Native nations was the exclusive prerogative of Congress and the federal government. These three cases unilaterally redefined relationships between Whites and Indians in America. Native nations were no longer sovereign nations. Indians were reduced to the status of children and declared wards of the state. And with these decisions, all Indian land within America now belonged to the federal government. While these rulings had legal standing only in the United States, Canada would formalize an identical relationship with Native people a little later in 1876 with the passage of the Indian Act. Now it was official. Indians in all of North America were property.

[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance. Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it. Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.

Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.